


the blue and the beast

by screwds



Category: Persona 5
Genre: Backstory, Character Study, Figurative Language, Gen, second palace spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-09
Updated: 2017-06-09
Packaged: 2018-11-12 05:01:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11154774
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/screwds/pseuds/screwds
Summary: Yusuke was trained by Madarame in painting. It, as everything, devolves.





	the blue and the beast

**Author's Note:**

> Self-indulgent backstory for Yusuke prior to the events of the Second Palace. Yusuke was one of the only party members to awaken to his Persona without prompting from the protag. Goemon's imagery was fun to play around with, as was Yusuke's general thematic-ness. 
> 
> This work is...very self-indulgent, and unbeta'd. Not sure if all ends were quite tied up or given as much justice as due, but here it is. If you're reading, I hope you enjoy.

 

Before he had ever stepped foot into a Palace and awoken Ishikawa Goemon, Yusuke Kitagawa had known he wore a mask.

Madarame, in grooming his apprentices, had stood before his easel in his worn yukata and long grey beard and hard dark eyes. He had said, “It is not just the canvas you need to paint, Yusuke. You need to paint the audience as well.”

And Yusuke, Yusuke was so young at the time. He had gripped his paintbrush tighter. It was still wet with crimson. His fingers were tipped with it. He had been happily smearing it over pale white canvas, bold strokes and amorphous shapes. “What do you mean, sensei?” And oh, his voice was so high and trusting, and Madarame’s mouth curved like a pomegranate bursting, and terrible things lurked in the promise of the things he was about to impart.

“Exactly that, Yusuke. Exactly that.”

So Yusuke learned to paint the audience.

His words were carefully pretty to lure the patrons with their money-fisted hands. His eyelashes were deliberately curled with mascara, the better to look up coyly from under them. He gestured wildly with his long arms clad in zebra pinstripes and the crowd turned as one to follow his movement. His face was blank and his heart was hollow and his teeth were very, very white.

He learned to sweep their mundane concerns away with soft brushstrokes of flattery. He learned to laugh at exactly the right pitch to their insightful comments on Madarame’s work. He learned to let tears brush his eyes at the beauty of Madarame’s work, and women and men alike would be _so charmed_ as his voice wavered in supposed passion.

He learned his heart burned like frostbite when a patron lavished praise on his own work, attributed to Madarame. He learned to bite his lips to redden them like “Sayuri” for those who followed him with hungrier eyes. He learned to smile, and smile, and smile, and hope that his purposely crinkled eyes made his bared teeth kind.

\---

Yusuke slowly painted up his heart like a kabuki actor. First, he buried his concern and guilt and disgust and pride under a fresh skin of white snow. He numbed his veins and stilled his heartbeat. He let the passion steal away under leaden white greasepaint until he was only blank canvas.

The _kumadori_ demanded eyes to see with, so Yusuke painted narrow sharp eyes with fingers dipped in black. It demanded a mouth to declaim with, so Yusuke painted an open gash with fingers dipped in blue. He could not be terrifying or heroic, so he painted his heart into a ghost--blue lines radiating outwards. His heart was a walking bruise.

\---

“This is an important part of your education, Yusuke,” Madarame had said severely. “I expect you to master it on top of your other studies.” And Yusuke, who had learned of human vanity and greed, saw in Madarame the exact thing he saw in high-horsed patrons of his gallery shows. An abominable bottomless hunger howling for more, more, always more.

“Yes, sensei,” he said, and bowed his head. There was no escaping the greed. Yusuke hid behind his ghostly heart and offered tithes of art, of obedience, of loyalty. He watched as others crumbled to Madarame’s yawning jaws and left, a ruined mess.

There were some that tried to shield him, take him along. Their shoulders weren’t broad enough to support the weight of even their own survival. He’d walk past them in Shibuya and meet their eyes under weathered, lined faces. He’d offer them his meagre lunch, the last of his yen, and walk away. If he stayed any longer, his heart would break under the seething violent jealousy. They were free. He was a haunting ghost.

He remembered Nakanohara. Bitterly lonely, grateful as a blooming flower, broken for the transgression of being human and independent. He had been the last of the last, the kindest Yusuke remembered, and he too, had been driven out of Madarame’s studio.

\---

And then, there was one.

Yusuke Kitagawa, Rapunzel to Madarame’s atelier, kept quiet and painted. He painted portraits and still-lifes that sold like grassfire. He painted crooked black lines and blank spaces that sold even better. He painted the audience and patrons alike. He painted classmates and teachers and strangers. He painted himself.

He painted himself a new mask every night to dull the outrage straining to escape his heart. He painted himself a calm and dignified Yusuke Kitagawa. He painted over the shady deals he saw in the odd hours of the night, the curiosity he held for the peacock-tail door, the cracking pain and anger and fondness he called his relationship to his sensei.

His hands never shook while he was painting.

\---

He was always startled when he looked in the mirror. He put his hands to his face, his fingers to his cheeks, and when he drew them away, they showed clean bare skin. He half-expected blue and white. When he looked into his own eyes they were tired and empty and blue.

He knew lots of words for blue. Cadmium, cobalt, cerulean. Phthalo, Prussian, palatinate. Vein-blue, melancholic blue, ghost blue.

Nowadays, he hated painting with blues. One color would melt into the next and he would wake up from a trance covered entirely in paint. It flecked the skin between shirtcuff and wrist. It stained his fingers and shoulders. It refused to be scrubbed away from reddening skin.

All his paintings were blue--indigo, sky, midnight, velvet. His school uniform, he noted for the first time, was the color of drowning. The city he walked through, concrete and glass and brick and mortar, reflected only cloudless sunny sky.

He didn’t start panicking until his vision became stained with blue.

\---

It was hard, but not impossible, to see other colors.

Primary colors were the easiest to separate from blue. Yusuke could easily avoid fire hydrants, stop-signs, and the occasional siren-clad ambulance. He walked frequently into alien-blue lawns, dramatically blue-lit classrooms, mica-specked oceans of sand.

His head turned at every flash of sun-yellow and heart-red. His pulse quickened, his blood beat, and for one brief moment, his heart ventured out from behind its mask. He didn’t know what he was looking for. He would know it when it wasn’t blue.

\---

The first time he felt fear since he’d painted his heart a kabuki mask, his hands had shook when he picked up a paintbrush.

His hands never shook when painting.

Madarame prowled the living room, the atelier, and locked himself in the peacock-tail room for long periods of time. His restlessness translated effortlessly to impatience at Yusuke’s slow pace. Impatience transmuted into frustration. Frustration resulted in his calm face targeted in Madarame’s eyes, filled with pitiless greed and hunger.

Yusuke Kitagawa, after all, was another in a long line of artists meant to make Madarame’s brand great. His art would never see the light of day under his name. Madarame would drain him dry, and wring him out, and after he was done, he would toss him aside like all the other pupils he’d abandoned.

Par for the course, really. And if he thought he could expect any better? Well, he could just look at his classmates, and watch those apprenticed stomp firmly on their souls, their consciences, their glitter in their eyes, all for an opportunity to keep painting. (What prestige! The patrons would exclaim, and they would keep quiet and suffer together).

Today, well. Today, Madarame had shrugged off his kindly public persona. Advanced upon Yusuke like a caged, dying tiger. Smiled till his skin stretched skull-like over his face.

“Yusuke,” he had said softly, tenderly. Yusuke avoided his eyes. Looking into them would only anger him. “What’s the matter, my boy? You haven’t been producing anything but blue paintings of late. Are you feeling alright?”

“Yes, sensei,” Yusuke had said to the vicinity of Madarame’s chest.

“Picasso was quite famous for his Blue Period. Art critics loved and hated those works in the same breath. Picasso was in a deep depression during this time. Now, I don’t care to answer questions about my supposed mental state. Wouldn’t it be foolish if a question like that came up at my next art showing?”

Yusuke wasn’t stupid. He had an art scholarship to Kosei High. Smarter men had one by one been broken by Madarame’s influence.

“Yes, sensei,” he said again.

Madarame smiled again. Yusuke thought of bottomless hunger, and ever-watching eyes, and a spiderweb that plucked his limbs like puppets.

Picking up his paintbrush felt like betrayal. He turned to his canvas and set red paint like weeping upon its surface. Hoped that it would be enough.

\---

It was of course then that he saw a flash of red like vibrancy from across the subway in Shibuya--the first true red he had seen in so long. Red like fire, of course, but red like bitter, hard-won freedom. Red like a sucker punch, a baseball on a collision course, a sudden change of heart. Red like a lifeline, so he took the chance and chased it through the middle of the busy Shibuya Station Square.

He met Ann Takamaki, pink-flustered and crimson-legged, her smile flashing dangerous and kind. He met Ryuji Sakamoto, obnoxious and loud and upfront as his sun-yellow shirt. He met Akira Kurusu, who was not blue or yellow or red, but muted in black and white like sheathed steel. And from the corner of his eye, when Kurusu thought he wasn’t watching, he was red like Eden’s temptation and Eve’s rebellious smile and the guilt of being caught.

Yusuke pressed tickets into their hands, careful words into their ears. Pled with his eyes for their brightness to invade his life. Was leashed forcibly when Madarame pulled up in his car, calling him to heel.

He went, and the world was no longer simply shades of blue.

\---

They’d explained, later, when he fell into Madarame’s Palace, about the masks and cognitive distortions and still-beating hearts they’d changed. He had looked at each of them in turn, and could not dredge the words to tell them about painting people. About the existence of his own mask. About the fury, the outrage, the passion he had hidden behind a ghost.  About his vision stained in blue, his lips red like “Sayuri _”_ , his unsaid words he tucked behind white teeth and curled lip and painted heart.

They also had a talking cat.

Madarame’s Palace was an exercise in overindulgence and studied opulence. It would be a mistake to call it tasteful by any stretch of imagination. Yusuke stared around in disdain--polite velvet blue and Damascus gold and the rich susurration of thieving feet on plush carpets. Glass and froth and frippery. Gilt and gold and the crushing sense of exploitation.

It screamed luxury. It screamed a inexorable desire for fame and recognition and possession. It did not scream any appreciation for the art that it housed, begrudgingly, as if the art was less important than the grandeur of the museum.

Pitiful, really.

He wasn’t, precisely, surprised. Shocked, yes. Vindicated, yes. But surprise was out of the question when he had himself as a living result of Madarame’s insouciance.

Madarame himself--or rather, a mockery of the man--appeared in silken slippers and cloth-of-gold, lips painted Cinderella-red and eyes yellow-bright and cruel with greed. His arrogance curled tangibly in the air like smoke. His hands were well-manicured and clean, unstained by even a speck of paint, a hint of blood, a whiff of the despair he engendered.

This Madarame fake declaimed words that roiled in Yusuke’s ears. A justification of his acts. A callous disregard for trodden life. Such pretty words. Words that made him narrow his eyes, clench his fists, _realize_ for the first time. What was the point? _What was the point?_ He’d cannibalized a few dozen promising artists for his own reputation, and for what? For money? Fame? Riches and recognition and glory beyond all?

What a fucking joke.

His mask cracked, crackled. It split to pieces. The fury came rushing blue. Blue flames raced along his bones and absolved them of their sin of dormancy. Blue flames crawled through his veins and absolved them of their sin of existing. Blue flames entered his heart and rejoiced and danced and burned his ghost-mask out of existence.

Never again would he willingly chain his heart like that. Never again would he acquiesce so softly to the false-countenanced Madarame. Never again would he let himself be resigned to a fate like sacrifice--not without his willing and express permission. He’d made his choice.

They’d all made their choices.

He felt like he was dying. He felt like a heart attack. He felt the most alive he’d ever been, eyes opened wide, and a curious cool weight on his face. With bleeding fingertips he reached up and took hold of the mask and ripped it clear from his being. His frozen blue-clad self emerged and shattered. Teeth. Anger. A howling snarl.

Ishikawa Goemon emerged as a red-painted hero.

\---

In the aftermath, he looked at himself and saw a walking ghost brought back to life. He wore blue and white and a kitsune mask painted laughing. He reached up and touched his mask. His fingertips were still stained with red.

“Curious,” he said, and fell to his knees.

The Phantom Thieves crowded around him. They hovered anxiously. He looked at them, and then at them again. Takamaki, who touched her mask self-consciously and stood straight and tall in her red catsuit. Sakamoto, who ducked his head a little and scrubbed the back of his neck with hands dipped in sunshine. Morgana, who was little and round and bright. Kurusu, who offered a small smile, and tucked his guilt-red hands in his pockets.

“You must really tell me more about this,” he said. His heart bubbled and sang. Anger raced along his veins. Passion flooded his lungs. Goemon sat smugly in the back of his head. “This thing known as...the Phantom Thieves?” He felt his lips curl into a smile edged with teeth.

And so they did, and so they were, and so it was.

 

 


End file.
